Danallmighty’s Blog

HTTP – Used to send and receive information over the internet. When you type in a url you’re sending an http request to a server for a webpage.

Head – The top part of the HTML code.

Body – The main part of the HTML code, where all the central information is kept.

DOCTYPE – A declaration made before the content of the page.

CSS – Is a computer language that is used to write formatting instructions.

WWW – The web is a network of files which can be viewed.

Domain name – Is an indentifier, also known as an address.

Website Accessibility – Is about having equal access to online soucres for everyone.

FTP – Is when files are sent or recieved across the internet.

URL – Identifies the location of a website on the internet.

Firewall – Is a secruity system that manages the connection between computers, systems and the internet.

div – Is an html component used to add group content.

PHP – Is an open source scripting language.

Open Source – A computer program where the underlying code is made avaliable to the public.

Propriety Source – Is a software owned by one company, to use it you must purchase it then agree to terms and conditions.

ASPX – It allows programmers to build websites using ASP.net code.

Blockquote – It is used if you are putting in a large quotation on your webpage

Anchor – The anchor is shown as an ‘a’ tag and is used at the end of hyperlinks. The ‘a’ tag defines an achor point.

Definition list – This describes items in a list as a ‘dl’ tag.

.gif file – Graphics Interchange Format, limited to 256 colours.

.jpg file – Joint Photographic Expert Group, an image format used for photos.

<ol> – The HTML denotes the start of an ordered list.

<ul> – Creates an unordered list, with each item bulleted.

<li> – Creates a list item

1. Should the web be censored?

In short, no. The web is a large social forum where everyone has the right to post content to their liking, regardless whether you agree with it or not. If we were to censor the web as a whole we would also be taking things down that aren’t nessicerly bad, but are frowned upon by certain groups/people.

2.  If so, by who?

Research and develop a list of at least three of each of the below:

What movies were being shown?

• Z
• Medium Cool
• Weekend
• If…
• Last Summer
• The Wild Bunch
• Easy Rider
• True Grit
• Downhill Racer
• War and Peace

(List from http://www.listsofbests.com/list/9076)

What music was being listened to?

• Aquarius, Fifth Dimension
• Sugar, Sugar, Archies
• I Can’t Get Next To YoHonky Tonk Women, Rolling Stonesu, Temptations
• Build Me Up Buttercup, Foundations
• Dizzy, Tommy Roe
• Hot Fun In The Summertime, Sly and The Family Stone
• I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, Tom Jones
• Everyday People, Sly and The Family Stone
• Get Together, Youngbloods

(Top 10 list taken from http://www.musicoutfitters.com/topsongs/1969.htm)

 Find out major political events that happened.

Globally:

• Soviet Union launches Venera 6 towards Venus 
• Richard Nixon is the 37th President of the United States

What Makes a Good Website?/ What Makes a Bad Website?

http://danallmighty.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/internet-love-hate/

A list of things that can be done with the internet now:

• Online shopping
• Online businesses
• Online banking
• Social networking
• Online gaming
• Ability to share media content
• Email

A Internet Wishlist:

• Somekind or 3d virtual world

Navigation:

Menu Tree

Tab Navigation

Index Navigation

Drop down navigation

Page turning navgation

Metaphor & Icon navigation

Combination Navigation

How do I reference a website?

To reference a website we use APA Referencing. Using this we must reference the time, day, month and year it was accessed. Along with this we must also reference the name of the webpage and the url. If we were to look at my own blog it would look something like this:

Referencing. (2009, June 18). Retrieved June 18, 2009, from danallmighty’s blog: http://www.danallmighty.wordpress.com.

Referencing stuff from the web is easy and convienent, but there is a major disadvantage which is unreptuable sources. A prime example of this would be the site wikipedia. Being a site that allows the user to change or publish any information they want on articles, this allows people to upload information that may not be correct or even true. If you were to use information from wikipedia you would have to check all the way to the original source, which is easy enough but if you were to use a site like Oxford Online and The Times you can avoid all of this.

It helps that you check that more than just the one site has the same information. So instead of focusing on getting your information from one site use more than one.

Quantitative:

Quantitative research is objective. Looking at the hard side of an argument and distancing yourself from personal opinion and looking at what the results and research says.

Qualitative:

Qualitative research is the opposite, being subjective rather than objective. Looking at personal experiences, relations and other things that are affected personally. As opposed to the hard data of quantitative you have to take into account backgrounds and values.

Plain English:

When writing in plain english the objective is to be as simple as possible in your message. No cliches, jargon and confusion in meaning. Clear and understanding.

What are the e-governemt web standards and do you think they are necessary?

The E-Goverment  Web Standards are policies that set the standards for accessibility and policy-compliance web sites in New Zealand. What this basically means is that the web standards are there to make sure that there’s equality in the way New Zealanders can acces the web.

Yes, I think the access to the internet and how it’s accessed is important and everyone should have the same options and whatever other options they may need to make accessibility an easy experience.

Fixed:

http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/web-guidelines/index.html/view?searchterm=web%20standards

Fluid:

http://www.gamespot.com/

Flash:

http://www.nickjr.com/playtime/index.jhtml

What is the CSS box model?

A CSS box model is used to display a page on the web. Invisible margins, paddings and borders that allow you to create this box. You can have a main box and inside this box you can have any number of smaller boxes, as long as they’re set at different settings and sizes.

Discuss internet security precautions you should take when using the web:

• Install whatever updates your computer needs to protect it from the latest viruses and whatnot
• Keep Internet browser up to date
• Give wireless networks extra protection
• Don’t have too much protection
• Secure your network for future problems

How can you help a search engine index your webpages?

Design and content guidelines

• Have a clear hierarchy and text links
• Have a clear site map that points to the main and important parts of your site
• Have clear and  page content
• Think about the words used on your site (so they can be sourced in a search engine)
• Try and use text rather than images that contain text
• Check you have no broken links

Technical guidelines

• It is suggested to use a text browser such as lynx to examine your site this is because search engine spiders veiw your site in the same way as lynx dose
• Allow the search engine bots to crawl your site with out having to use session ID’s or arguments that track thir paths through your website.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header
• Use of the robots.txt file on your web server
• If you use a content managment system, make sure that your systemcan export your content so that spiders can crawl your site
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers

(This information was sourced from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769)

 If you used the google search engine to find a webpage, if the links were always blue, Would this bother you?

If the links were always blue, then yes, that would bother me. Blue links remind me whether or not I have visited the link before or not. Even though this is just a simple luxury it’s quite an important one that helps internet users daily.

There are many diagrams of the internet backbone online. Find one that you think is the easiest to follow and link to it in your blog.

Two links that I came across were:

http://navigators.com/internet_architecture.html

And

http://www.theshulers.com/whitepapers/internet_whitepaper/index.html

Discuss your understanding of website accessibility and its relevance.

 To be completely honest I didn’t know what web accessibility was until I looked it up on wikipedia, just right now. Now that I know what it is I feel pretty bad for not knowing what it was for so long, as well as not even knowing about it, I can completely admit that how I perceieve the web and work with it I have taken totally for granted. Things like not being able to use a mouse, seizures caused by flashing effects should definitely be addressed as everyone should have an easy and painless experience when using the web and everything that comes with it.

Lian has asked us to explain a few internet terms, I’ll be using this post to keep my own glossary on words we’re asked to research and explain.

Cookies: A cookie is information that’s sent from the web server to the web browser. The browser software is expected to save this information, such as passwords or logins, and send it back to the server when needed. Depending on the type of cookie the server will either save it for a long or short period of time.

Fixed layout: Fixed layout is when a website will not change depending on what size you resize the browser. It will look the same on any browser and computer.

Liquid layout: Liquid layout, the opposite of a fixed layout. The content of the website will change when the brower is resized, increased when viewed at a larger screen and decresed when viewed smaller.

Today we learned some pretty neat stuff concerning html from Lian, who by the way is back from her wedding/honeymoon, yay! What did we learn? Well, most of the stuff we went over this morning we learnt last week which is not a bad thing since I kinda didn’t remember much.  The main thing we learnt was how to link from one page to another. 

I’m trying to remember the exact format, I think it goes something like this:

<a href=”..index” something something something. Yeah, I forget right now. Once we go over it some more I’m sure it’ll be ingrained in me and then I’ll be an html machine.

That’s it for now. Bye blog.

It’s not everyday I blog twice a day, but Abby has asked that we show two examples of  sites we like and sites we don’t like as much but hey I’ll still look at them because why would I know about them if I didn’t go to them.  Anyway.

Sites that are awesomesauce:

http://www.warrenellis.com/

And

http://questionablecontent.net/

So! The first link is to a comic/book author’s blog. The thing with blogs is that they’re easy to navigate. You scroll up, scroll down and click on any hyperlinks that tickle your fancy. I’m not one for fancy graphics or flashy images. If it’s simple, to the point and easy to explore then I’m sold. Same goes for the second link which is to a webcomic I check out daily-ish. Same thing applies to this site as the first, easy to navigate and to the point.

Now, for sites that are not awesomesauce:

http://au.ign.com/

And

http://www.neilgaiman.com/

First things first. I like these sites. I really do, it’s the fact that they’re hard to navigate that makes me cringe whenever I’m on them. Out of the two the latter is the lesser offender, it’s more of a pet peeve than anything that has made me choose it as a disliked site.

First link is for a site all things gaming and it completely fails. Sure the information is great and it looks well presented but the outcome is one that doesn’t work for me. It seems it has a case of too much information it’s trying to get out at one time so that whenever you’re looking at the site you’re bombarded with a whole lot of other stuff you’re really not there for.

As I mentioned before the second site is more of an annoyance than anything else. It’s another blog, but to get to the blog you have to go through the main page, which for something so insignificant is surprisingly frustrating. When you get to the blog the posts seem to kind of melt together, as opposed to the first blog I linked to where that has clear lines everytime a new post is added.

In conclusion, I’m not one for flashyness. If it is a pretty pretty site then that’s cool too, it’s just not really that big of a deal for me as much as easy navigation is.

Dear Blog,

First class, early morning and what happens? Computers refuse to work. At all. It was touch and go there for a bit but as a class we preveiled against the Technology Crisis of ‘09.

Oh hey blog, long time no blog I guess?

Just came back from a lecture/presentation from a professional design dude named Colin Phillips (not Phil Collins, according to Lisa) who talked about the history of the net and also other web related stuff.  The information he shared was informative and generally interesting. He also totally told a dude to get the fuck out, not really in those words, because he was late with a lame excuse, which was pretty fun.

It was good to hear someone who’s in the business, their personal opinion on how things word and how certain software has come in X many years. Overall I enjoyed this morning blog, you should’ve been there but maybe another time?

Als, he likes Watchmen, so props to him.

31st of October 2008, five acts were inserted into the Copyright Act 1994. These new sections are 92A, 92B, 92C, 92D and 92E. Or shortened down to 92A to 92E. Throughout this post I will break down each law and share my opinion on them and what they basically mean. The following laws can be found at :   http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/latest/DLM1122643.html

“92A: Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers.“

The first act states two things; the terms for account termination and what an infringer actually is. Subsection 1 of 92A only states that the Internet service provider must, “…implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances“. It does not states the terms or conditions, which means that technically someone could be cut from their connection for no given reason other than their Internet service provider does not agree with their download.

(Cont…)

Blogging is pretty frustrating guys.

Dearest Blog,

Today is my first day of blogging. It’s pretty rad.

Oh hey, look, it’s a link to Whitireia: www.whitireia.ac.nz